DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller. First published 1949.

I never liked the name Janaiker Mrityu (Death of Someone) given to the Bengali version of the play. A salesman in a capitalist society is not just someone. He is a unique entity encompassing a unique set of virtues and vices not to be found in earlier economies. For my own purpose I quote from the play:

Willy- Figure it out. Work of a lifetime to payoff a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.

Linda-Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.

Linda spoke like that, okay. World over, on the contrary, all the countless Lindas think differently. They want to have houses of their own. It is instinctive since they themselves are houses. Their bodies are houses to bear, feed, and nurture the embryos of generations of mankind. Linda was only consoling Willy Loman over the inevitability of break up of a family, over leaving a house to nobody. Obviously, Linda could not mean it sincerely. And that is only natural. This Death of a Salesman, as I progress afresh for umpteenth time I am stunned by the overwhelming depth of Arthur Miller notwithstanding the canards and gossips crafted over the media. The theme is lasting for sixty years with clear signals of lasting for a century unless not “existing” socialism but real socialism starts controlling productive forces and the economy. The play, for once, strives to bring an individual out of stereotype when and where Charley says one must have something to sell otherwise you are destined for the black hole.

It is astonishing and amusing also to view us in the mirror. With what a tremendous load of illusion we continue to live and suffer only to see us dramatized and look at each other and realize that the fellow beside me is also similarly suffering and hoping and waiting for a morning with a flood of sunshine.

And the pride, arrogance and their futility when viewed in the context of relationship between parents and offspring overpowers us with such sadness. Father figure is a miniature hero and he is worshipped forgetting that the heroes too have feet of clay. Loman is continually failing and boasting and getting beaten and ending up in ridiculous womanizing in full view of his elder son Biff. When the wreckage of this son rebels in frustration he threatens him despairingly. Really, quite moving and relevant till today.

FESTIVAL FLAVOURS

FROM THE NOTE BOOK (7)

In the mind’s eye frames move backward. A serpentine coloured streak, mostly red and green , is moving forward along the earthy brown bridle path between the dense and dazzlingly green tea bushes over the undulating low hillocks of Surma valley tea gardens of Cachar area in India, Sylhet and Chittagong of present day Bangladesh. Tea garden labourers , mostly women were going to join the Durga Puja. Their own complexion, predominantly glistening ebony black among all the surrounding colours with their own defiantly bright red saris under a magical cloudless blue sky left me with a loner’s happiness which a loner can only enjoy. In fact, my first conscious feeling of a Durga Puja was gathered from the tea garden Durga Pujas. Almost all tea gardens had English managers and under managers In the matter relating to Durga Puja they stretched their generosity to the farthest limit. Every garden used to have community Natch Ghar (dance hall). That was the main venue of the puja.

This colourful procession I was watching from a slow moving train’s window while on way to visiting a friend in a tea garden. This friend was in the Royal Indian Navy in the British days, an accused in the naval mutiny and demobilized after the Second World War, one among the seven million made unemployed at that time. He had a sprawling ancestral property on the fringe of a famous tea estate. He dabbled in what was called progressive political activity. He was supposed to help me in my feeble attempt at trade union activity among the garden labourers in the dangerous days of Pakistani regime. He asked me to stay with him during the pujas. And that once a

gain threw me back into the folds of my childhood tea garden pujas. The colour, illumination by incandescent lights, sound of many hundred voices of men, women and children, absence of microphone and loud speakers , swirling dust of red earth, performance of plays ,mostly mythological by itinerant jatra parties of local origin on four side open stage. The actors had to have enormous lung power and ability to gesticulate powerfully to captivate the thousand strong audience throughout the night. And the overwhelming smell of biris, combined with that of sweets fried and made syrupy in oil and sugar of dubious quality. A painter could be very happy with all this.

The only jarring note was struck by my former seaman friend with his weakness for ganja and bhang, the potent resinous extraction of different grades from cannabis you smoke or mix with sweetened milk and drink.
But all the same childhood returned for a couple of days. We would throng around in our not so clean half shirts, shorts, frocks in the wealthy neighbor’s house and watched with intense curiosity and surprise how the kumars (sculptors) were building images of Durga and her cohorts. First, split bamboo pieces tied together with hay fastened over, then plastering with adhesive black clay brought specially from river bed which had to be kneaded with finely cut jute for more cohesion, We, all Apus and Durgas of the locality watched how carefully and truthfully the sculptors tried to shape the female and male anatomy of the Gods and Goddesses .Then with paints how a piece of hessian sheet soaked in clay turned in to a beautiful sari with borders of wonderful flower pattern. In our contemporary innocence we earnestly believed in miracles and divine deliverance.

This innocence was only relative. Every age has its own variety of childish innocence. When we also grew up later under the shadow of newly acquired arrogance of skepticism, argumentativeness and disbelief this turned into a ridiculous nothing. But that smell of shefali, view of white kash on the banks of mirror-calm rivers under an azure blue sky with drum beats around and the image of gorgeous goddess Durga always lead back to a wonderful feeling of happiness.

Image courtesy Internet: Apu and Durga, still from "Pather Panchali", a film by Satyajit Ray

OF BOOKS AND READING

FROM THE NOTE BOOK (6)
Speaking about oneself is one of the greatest pleasures. One of the greatest self indulgences one may say half deprecatingly. A high pitched love for words, sentences etc. and a frenzied reading habit develop in my kind of people exceptionally early and leave them hopefully or , if one would say hopelessly dependant upon them. What starts as a desultory way of reading, sometime romance, sometime poetry, sometime thriller, sometime racy trash, sometime really serious things, through the churning of time evolve in to something which gather around it elements of little wisdom, little knowledge. People like us usually remain content with whatever pebbles we are able to collect from the shores of what Newton described as ocean of knowledge and wisdom. Let us only be watchful that we are not turning away from those shores.

Familiarity with alphabets or words or reading and writing or even excellence in them hardly ensure against the deviation from the path of reason and logic. The powerful weapon provided by books still remains the most powerful and basic. The astonishing development in electronics is continually providing us with startlingly smarter and smarter way of acquiring knowledge. But the books are very personal. Read if you wish. Do not read if you do not. Closing or opening a book it is all up to you. Written words, in the history of human civilisation, quietly and steadily has contributed so much that no other development can come any close to this. I am no Lord Chesterfield’s son whose father could boast that he had given his son the best education that money could buy. We had very little money but a disproportionately large assortment of books scattered around an unimpressive modest house filled with an electrical impulse for reading. It was very different from what is called education for which none of us had any eagerness. Of course, plenty of urge was there to fetch a degree and a steady job. That was all about education, acquiring some comprehension of formal patterns that come along with formal education. This cannot be described as enthusiasm or respect.

In the thirties and forties of past century Bengali middle class families produced such youths. Tagore blazed the trail and during last ten years of his life he even asked the upcoming generation to defy him as an icon. We can once again try to understand Abhik in his "Rabibar". He was fearless that a change could sweep him aside. Books are books, inert by themselves.

But the electronic media channels have completely opened up itself to the upsurge of retrogression. Books are books. They cannot be changed. They can only be burnt. They can be lost for awhile only to reappear afresh from the ashes. Books cannot be effectively made vehicles of reaction and retrogression however much a section of writers long to make themselves commodities in the market place. In the existing economy all of us have to become commodity willingly or unwillingly. There is no escape from this. The struggle that a writer wages before being swallowed by market economy driven by big money and even after being swallowed register the marks of his artistic honesty, sensitiveness and greatness. Books and writings retain enduring marks of this struggle. This is one of the greatest points why books are different.

This is the backdrop. Greatness or great things do not pop up in a void. There is a void created by a dying culture The behemoth of electronic media is thriving upon this and feeding their huge clientele on a steady diet of foolish entertainment of mindless sex, of heaps of naked bodies wrestling with each other, gory violence, ridiculous obscurantism and all that.

This business of sex is very interesting.

These frenzied efforts to market sex have led to an insane fear of losing sex. The increasing ascendancy of sex prophets in media is a clear indication of this. There is nothing shameful or fearful about sex. Citing examples from only Kamasutra has become very ordinary and monotonous. Better read Kadambari of Bana Bhatta or Kalidasa’s Kumara Sambhavam and learn from the simmering warm sex of Mahashweta or Mahadeva’s coital pleasure with Parvati how passionately sex was described about a thousand years back.

Since book reading is not a guided tour conducted by a dolled up dud on the TV screen, you are left with full liberty to play with and fondle your imagination with any number of colours and tunes you wish. Books offer you this since it has inherent respect for every human soul. And it is a book that created Don Quixote by Cervantes, the unmatchable joke from the fantasy world of a book worm. In fact only books can do this. Over indulgence and dependence upon gadgets may lead one to a darkened world without books.

The pleasure and benefits derived from the ever evolving gadgets are ephemeral. Technology is being used more to push back and vulgarise all progressive cultural efforts. The first book I read with complete attention in my childhood was Ramayana by Krittivasa -- all the seven cantos stopping only for food and sleep. I am grateful to my book-loving parents till this ripe old age.

Image courtesy Internet: Dali's Don Quixote

WRITER'S WORLD

FROM THE NOTE BOOK (5)

In my earlier blog I quoted a two and half page excerpt from The Hungry Tide of Amitav Ghosh. Portrayal of some characters by some authors appear to be very similar (not in every respect, of course) to someone very close to us. In this context Piya reminded me of my daughter for her stubborn idealism, never say die attitude. This may not attract many who are after a soft life of affluence and comfort. In the instant case the author did not compromise with cheap ridicule the yearning of those who opt for such lives. Rather, his admiration was quite prominent. That is what attracted me towards these lines.

Those who are devoted to various art forms they are not concerned with a dissertation on political economy. He or she might have sound or unsound political or philosophical ideas and this may or may not affect his or her creative products, literary or otherwise. We saw Beethoven effusive after Napolean’s take over of Austria. This single fact did not lower his greatness. We found Tagore charmed by Mussolini’s fascistic ideas till Rolland removed the spell over him. We know Knut Hamsun was frankly a fascist politically but his creativity was not burdened by that. Nearer home we saw Sarat Chandra lecturing Hindu communalism and at the same time creating wonderful character of Gafur in Mahesh. While discussing Herzen or Shaw Lenin took this dialectical appraisal of creative world. Most of our confusions stem from an obstinate abs olutism. In such a world, to quote Herzen, “we are not doctors, we are the disease.”

I am not highly conversant with Amitav Ghosh’s works. I have heard a lot about him, read only a couple of his books. These were all inspired by the fact of his being an award winning celebrity. I do not have competence to judge him. In fact I feel so far as lives and happenings of estuarine Bengal are concerned Manik Bandopadhya wrote a better book. I mean his Padma Nadir Majhi (the boatman of Padma). Still, I liked Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide for its own qualities. Manik Bandopadhya could have written in English for he was quite competent in English language and literature, or he could have himself translated the book. In the unfortunate narrow confines of those times this did not happen. One more thing. In literary appreciation the reader looks for synchronization and harmony between content and form. A writer may not be able to achieve this always inspite of his best efforts. Manik Bandopadhya died with this anguish.